Some of our most important choices in life involve large uncertainty. How are we making such choices? Choice of careers, moral commitments, and political identities, are also transformative, i.e. they involve changes of preferences. I propose that people use role models as a key heuristic to guide them across such choices. Modeling complex choices as underpinned by choices of role models helps overcome some of the issues of the standard rational choice model (too computationally taxing, and limited capacity to deal with uncertainty), and of the sociological accounts of social norms (too top-down, limited scope for individual choice, and not able to account for the diversity of moral values co-existing on the same territory). Cultural avalanches can also be better understood as driven by the availability of certain role models. The economic model developed here is inspired by the account of prestige in social psychology.